This blog was initially launched as a resource for Ron Mohring's Working Class Literature course. New poems are posted irregularly. All are welcome to share and comment on poems by and about work and the working classes. To suggest a poem for inclusion or a book for the recommended reading list, please email ron dot mohring at gmail dot com; put Working Class Poems in your subject line. Thanks.

7.04.2009

Emma Goes Back to the Home-place

We canned two bushels of peaches.There are lots of tomatoesfor eating but they’re notripening too fast so we cankeep up with them. We don’thave the flowers we used to.My husband Will’s garden was fullof dill and he’s been fighting itall summer. I made dill pickles,though I can’t eat them. I wantto finish so I can replant violets.I have two and three in a pot.

Last week I took a notion to getsome of mother’s lamb’s tail,and figured it was still growingdown on the old home-place,even though the land has beenfifty years wild, most of itstrip-mined. So yesterday we tooka ride down to Sherret. Thingshave grown up something awful,lots of farms have gone back.

We parked and I took Will backthe old lane, and at the bottomof the mountain steps we founda stand of those long whiteblossoms—must have been a goodyear for them, they were all over.Mother had them up by the porch,on the mountaintop, but nowthey’ve seeded themselves below.I dug down and got a good clumpand put it in a cardboard box.We didn’t go up to the old place.The steps are gone, and I’m surethe house is too.

Next we visited one of my oldgirlfriends. She was marriedto a friend of my first husband.I haven’t seen them since my sonwas born nearly sixty years ago.Even their neighbors knew me,but for a while I kept them guessing.

I had been Sunday school secretaryand she was treasurer. When I toldher that, she had forgot. She hasturned kind of shaky. I said:I am Emma Dobson, but I used to bePeggy Lindsay, and before thatMargaret Woster. I didn’t gointo how I got all those names,but I was born Emma Margaret,then each of my husbands calledme a name to go with theirs.

She knew me by my first and criedMy God and hugged me. I imaginethere’s lots of folks I still knowall over down there, if I couldkeep up with where they’ve gone.I made them acquainted with Will.